What are enums and why are they useful?

Question

Today I was browsing through some questions on this site and I found a mention of an enum being used in singleton pattern about purported thread safety benefits

Answer 1

Enum inherits all the methods of Object class and abstract class Enum. So you can use it's methods for reflection, multithreading, serilization, comparable, etc. If you just declare a static constant instead of Enum, you can't. Besides that, the value of Enum can be passed to DAO layer as well.

Here's an example program to demonstrate.

public enum State {

    Start("1"),
    Wait("1"),
    Notify("2"),
    NotifyAll("3"),
    Run("4"),
    SystemInatilize("5"),
    VendorInatilize("6"),
    test,
    FrameworkInatilize("7");

    public static State getState(String value) {
        return State.Wait;
    }

    private String value;
    State test;

    private State(String value) {
        this.value = value;
    }

    private State() {
    }

    public String getValue() {
        return value;
    }

    public void setCurrentState(State currentState) {
        test = currentState;
    }

    public boolean isNotify() {
        return this.equals(Notify);
    }
}

public class EnumTest {

    State test;

    public void setCurrentState(State currentState) {
        test = currentState;
    }

    public State getCurrentState() {
        return test;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(State.test);
        System.out.println(State.FrameworkInatilize);
        EnumTest test=new EnumTest();
        test.setCurrentState(State.Notify);
        test. stateSwitch();
    }

    public void stateSwitch() {
        switch (getCurrentState()) {
        case Notify:
            System.out.println("Notify");
            System.out.println(test.isNotify());
            break;
        default:
            break;
        }
    }
}